buying new from a discounted overseas seller can be cheaper than the local RRP

having books shipped from Amazon in the US is only slightly more expensive than ordering them for mail order delivery from Borders in Australia

Abebooks is cheaper for second hand, principally due to Amazon's marketplace shipping fees. Amazon marketplace books often have a lower sticker price and higher shipping

Bookdepository in the UK remains the cheapest for new books from overseas

And anecdotally, based on looking the Civic and Belconnen branches of Dymocks, and the Borders shop in Civic, traditional booksellers seem to be playing safe and buying, and carrying more conservative stock, at least in Canberra, meaning having to order by mail from Borders for specialist books is overtaking rocking up to a bookstore

Doing this moves the long tail online, and into e-books, which could be dangerous as I have the suspicion that the long tail buy more books overall, and once they start buying online they stay online ....

Still havn't seen anyone offering a print on demand service for e-books yet, but Borders did offer to sell me Penguin classic electronic editions for around $12 a pop, which is competitive with second hand shipped internationally...

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Been an IT professional, a field ecologist and tried my hand at research in psychology. Now retired, I'm a blogger, twitterer, traveller, pontificator and classical and early medieval history geek - I'm also known to enjoy a decent pinot noir, and late night conversations about central Asia, the Russian Revolution and just about anything else.
Some claim I know too much about some things, some that I know too little.